>>>- Is it needed to devote the book for VFP grids? The book just for a single control in VFP?
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>>Absolutely not; you're locking yourself into a market of people whose sole tool for development is VFP5-7(8?,9? - who knows how long it will be until we can use common UI elements from .Net as easily as the native grid, and it's only for people writing fat clients. You further limit your audience to people who want to use it as the centerpiece of their 1:M interface.
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>>You further limit your audience to people who would actually read the book. My guess is that 85% of the grid-related questions here on UT are already covered in either the samples and docs that come with VFP or KiloFox. And the real can of worms isn't the grid itself, it's all the other controls you might want to embed in the grid.
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>I agree and not agree here. Agree that the most things are already covered at this and many other sites. And I do not agree that this could be used in form of knowledge. the book is all about learning and proper techniques. To get experiense and know good techniques for grids from all information in this site, it is required to re-read a lot of stuff, as well as try it by self on practice. This is because many things about gids here exists in form of problem-solving in particular situation, and rarely in form of sample code, good technique description or FAQ. This is just a matte of time and is up to the person. I think many developers would like to have a book with all things explained, instead of constant searching for information at the forums and newsgroups.
Vlad, my belief is that there is an audience of people who want to know the gory guts of Grids - the problem is, that while these are the people I'd love to hang with and hash out ideas on what belongs in advanced grid tools, the majority of the audience for either the Grid Book or the Grid Tool are looking for a 'fire and forget' solution - build a class or set of classes, implement a Wizard to help do the Inits and AddObjects and the like and gen the code - even if you project that the wizardly-developed thing is only 95-95% there, you'll find a lot more people who don't care a smidgin for the neat functionality and object philosopy of the grid and the UI philosophy of grid-based functionality, and want the Wizard to do the bulk of the work, hit your 'Customizing the Advanced Grid Constructor Behavior for Dummies' that accompanies the book, and lets them build something without much idea of the fascinating internals and niceties of the neat hacks. There's a sizable crowd of people who want to build a VFP app using the VFP7 App Builder, and can't even be bothered to figure out what VCXs going into the generated app so they can change an icon or hide a button in the composite classes which make me gag at the code. They don't understand frameworks, or UI philosophy - they want the great app generator that asks them a few questions, makes a horrible gnashing noise and out pops an app that 'they' wrote.
My opinion, take away most of the decision process, let them check a few checkboxes to enable a few specific features that they want along with a query generator to build the backing store, and generate a container that they can 'drop' on their form and then instance program the container class holding the embedded custom grid, and you'd have a real winner, especially if part of it allowed you to build a 'Mere Mortals' compatible grid container vs a CodeMine Grid vs a VMP Pro Grid that did the work of interfacing to their framework, and you'd have a goldmine. It wouldn't necessarily be the fascinating intellectual exercise of writing a book, but if you could make it so that it was much easier to get a legit copy for yourself rather than borrowing your brither's roommate's cousin's best friend's copy because you just need it just for one project, and Vlad's being unfair charging 150 rubles for a legitmiate, registered copy with support and greedy, so you borrow a copy to see how it works, do your project, rake in the dough, but never bother to pay Vlad for his good work developing and supporting the product. I'm very resentful of this attitude which I find so prevalent in so much of the non-Western developer community; you're one of the good guys, but there are a lot of others who don't see any value to any intellectual property except their own, which they'll try to protect by stealing the best copy protection on the market. Some of these people literally rip off good developer's ideas with the aid of tools like ReFox. It's hypocrisy at it's worst, and a sad statement about the values of a small segment of our community.
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>All above is just about the better organizing of information. And I'm not talkign about some kind of knowledge base, but about the book, which also contain some materials for learning.
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As I said, they won't buy the book, because someone else will and will give them the answer without them requiring the expenditure of neurochemical energy to get their answer. They pretend to be helpless puppies with pitiful scowls until handed exactly the code they want, at which point you're lucky to get a thankyou.
>>I think you'd be addressing the issue better writing a replacement for the VFP Grid Builder - the problem is that there are too many people who're simply too lazy to create custom grid classes because they aren't Visual Classes you can drag and drop to construct your complete interface without having two functioning braincells to rub together.
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>Not all things could be covered just by builder. I know this from experience - the builder, even very advanced, is good to create a prototype and is rarly useful for real development.
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Agreed - if you realize that you can do better. Some people can't imagine that they could improve an impressive prototype.
>It is also extremely hard to create something really universal that covers a lot of things and is reliable at the same time. It is much better to create a set of components adding which to grid you just add requird functionality (like Grid Highlighter, for example).
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>>From a commercial standpoint, a grid builder utility that could be added to any of the common frameworks would be a commercially more viable product. The problem of grids and grid behaviors is as closely tied to the UI philosophy of an app squirted out through an app genrator. If you're capable of adopting a framework and a consistent style or small set of styles of UI behavior based on a grid, you're 95% of the way through grids if your issue isn't "I want to drag and drop and not think about what goes on behind the curtain. " in which case, a book on grids won't help because they ain't gonna read it and make use of it...
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>>BTW, I'm not a Grid fan in case you haven't guessed that yet...
- < snip >
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>>I'd love to be wrong about this. It's a worthwhile project. I think if making money is the goal, a tool is more likely to succeed than a book, but I think you'll get FRX2WORDed.
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>FRX2WORDed - new therminology, right?
Yep - I don't think that the VFP community is aware of the phenominal amount of effort that went into getting FRX2WORD to where it is.
- < snip again >
>Really this is all about the correct way of marketing and doing business and support, when talk about money. The way HOW the component is represented to community and marked is also very important.
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>I guess the similar rules apply to the books, as well as to their content.
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I spent 10 years working for publishing compoanies... < g >
>This is my opinion only, and I might be wrong...
And so might I!
